The People's Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China

In 1942, in his concluding speech at the Yán'ān Forum on Literature and Art, Máo Zédōng set out his definitive statement on human nature: “Is there such a thing as human nature? Of course there is. But there is only human nature in the concrete, no human nature in the abstract. In a class society there is only human nature that bears the stamp of a class; human nature that transcends classes does not exist.”¹ His inspiration was a passage from Marx's Theses on Feuerbach: “The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations.”² Máo's authoritative interpretation set limits on what could be said about “humanity”: in the strictest possible terms, there was no universal human nature. This, then, was the flip side of the New Democracy. Progressive natural scientists and members of the Chinese bourgeoisie had a role to play in the revolution, but class differences would not be forgotten.

1. Mao Tse-tung, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Languages
Press, 1967–1971), 3:90. Quoted also in Donald J. Munro, The Concept of Man in
Contemporary China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), 21.

2. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Clas-
sical German Philosophy, Frederick Engels (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1976),
63.

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